Tenders invited for health projects

The Ministry of Health has called for tenders for a
controversial new healthy eating initiative.

The $3 million programme replaces Labour's Healthy Eating
Healthy Action, which was axed in the middle of this year. A
request for proposal on the Government's contracts website
said the ministry wanted to target obesity through improving
maternal and child health. Interested parties were invited to
devise projects focused on women's health during pregnancy
and the postnatal period; promoting healthy feeding for
babies, including breast-feeding; and nutrition and exercise
for preschoolers.

The ministry said it was changing the way it looked at, and
funded, obesity-prevention initiatives.

''Over the next three years, the ministry will be working to
ensure current public health programmes are better targeted
as well as identifying and investing in opportunities to
improve efficiency and impact, by doing things differently,''
the request for proposal document said.

Funding for the scheme would run from about March next year,
when programmes began, until June 2015.

The ministry said recent international evidence, and advice
from Prof Sir Peter Gluckman, suggested the preconditions for
obesity were set very early.

Labour health spokeswoman MP Maryan Street said the ''little
community-based projects'' such as free exercise sessions and
vegetable gardens in schools were the casualties of the
ministry's new approach.

The scheme ignored diabetes, which was a lost opportunity for
the epidemic of type 2 diabetes, a disease ''inherently
linked'' with obesity.

The focus on maternal health and young children must be
expanded into a comprehensive strategy to combat the huge
challenges of obesity and diabetes, she said.

Unlike Heha, for which funds were distributed through
district health boards, the new scheme is contestable by
DHBs, primary health organisations and non-government
organisations.

Proposals involving partnerships with the private sector were
encouraged, as were proposals with a regional or national
scope.

The anticipated minimum cost of each approved scheme was
$300,000.

The $3 million fund did not include GST.

A Southern District Health Board spokesman said the DHB had
not decided whether to tender for a project.

Is it really the MoH's business or right to regulate and
control bodies on a grand scale like this? The message
this could potentially give to young infants and children
seems appallingly irresponsible on the part of the Ministry
of Health. For childen to learn over and over again that you
can only be healthy by 'being skinny' is the irresponsible
part. This would further promote a severely narrow and
dangerous view of 'health' that will only act to benefit a
small minority of our population. For the rest of us, it will
be up to our personal resilience to resist such controlling
and undermining messages; remembering that hollistic health
is less about striving to look like a carved sport star or
fashion model and more about having a balance of health,
encompassing our thoughts and feelings, our relationships
with others, our spirituality, our connections to the past,
and our body - beautiful as it is.